Newt's Allies May Not Have Camped Out at Zuccotti Park, but They're Making Up for Lost Time

He's coming for you, and your job ... and your little dog, too!
Have you seen "When Mitt Romney Came to Town," the new attack ad in the form of a documentary released by the pro-Gingrich PAC Winning Our Future? You've got to watch it, because it is stunning. We've embedded a short (2:55) trailer for it below, but you can watch the full 28-minute doc, the subject of nonstop chatter in the political blogosphere since its release yesterday, at kingofbain.com.

"When Mitt Romney Came to Town" is both exactly what you'd expect -- a harsh attack on Romney -- and completely unexpected, in that it takes him down in a manner that 's entirely in sync with the rhetoric of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Romney is painted as a merciless, predatory, money-grubbing corporate raider who, as head of Bain Capital, bought companies, systematically stripped and destroyed them, and put thousands of people out of work while racking up breathtaking paydays (on the order of $100 million in one case) for Bain partners and investors. Pained and painful interviews with Romney's "victims" (think unemployed American heartlanders on the verge of tears) in four different cities are interspersed with snippets of Romney looking glib and greedy. (Of course, his famous "Corporations are people, my friend" line appears.) The doc ends with a series of stark-white-type-on-black-screen codas, including: "NEARLY EVERY U.S. STATE EXPERIENCED JOB LOSS FROM THE ACTIONS OF BAIN CAPITAL UNDER MITT ROMNEY."

How overblown is the video? Though it uses plenty of hoary, by -the-book documentary manipulations -- like, no kidding, black-and-white stock footage of some sinister-looking white guy smoking a cigar (fat-cat Wall Street banker!) -- it also repeatedly cites contemporaneous news accounts that clearly outline both staggering job losses and obscene Bain profits. (It should be noted that some of the news outlets cited, such as The New York Times and NPR, aren't usually treated with such reverence by conservative documentarians.)

And in many ways Romney remains defenseless to the accusations made in the doc because, as Keach Hagey writes at Politico, answers to questions about Romney's activities at Bain "have proven elusive to even the country's best journalists because of the very private nature of private equity. The greatest privacy-destroying force known to man -- an American presidential campaign -- is going head-to-head with one of the most secretive redoubts of the American economy and for now, the door of Bain's vault is holding."

At any rate, "When Mitt Romney Came to Town" is the documentary that Occupy Wall Street never got around to making. I'm not kidding or exaggerating at all.

UPDATE: After the above was initially published, Romney spokesperson Andrea Saul emailed me a link to a post at fortune.cnn.com by Dan Primack titled "Gingrich's 'Bain bomb' fizzles," which challenges the veracity of various assertions made in the anti-Romney
documentary. I told Ms. Saul that I'd be happy to update my post to
note that the Romney campaign asked that I link to the Primack post,
but I also asked her if the campaign would be issuing its own
point-by -point rebuttal to the documentary (and the ads that are
derived from it) or any other specific response, beyond sharing the
Primack link. Ms. Saul wrote back with this statement (which she also
issued to other news outlets around the same time):

"It is sad to see Speaker Gingrich and his allies so desperate to try
and revive his campaign that they've resorted to blatant falsehoods
and fabrications. These facts have been proven untrue and Speaker
Gingrich himself said the ads should be taken down." -- Andrea Saul,
Romney spokesperson

She also sent a link to an audio clip posted on YouTube titled "Newt Gingrich radio
interview, WRKO, Howie Carr Show, January 10, 2012" in which he
can be heard stating that "I'm glad to say publicly they should take
that out of the ad if that 's in the ad" -- referring to the hyperbolic
statement of a former employee of a company bought by Bain: "That
hurts so bad to leave my home because of one man that 's got 15 homes."

P.S. PolitiFact's
take: "We find that while the Romney family does own three houses
collectively valued at nearly $20 million, based on the public records
we've reviewed they don't own anything close to 15 homes."

Simon Dumenco is the "Media Guy" media columnist for Advertising Age. Follow him on Twitter @simondumenco.